f the Sakhlawiyah Canal. The
Tharthar depression, besides disposing of the Tigris flood-
water, would thus probably feed the Euphrates; and a second
barrage on the Tigris, to be built at Kut, would supply
water to the Shatt el-Hai. When the country is freed from
danger of flood, the Baghdad Railway could be run through
the cultivated land instead of through the eastern desert;
see Willcocks, _The Near East_, Oct. 6, 1916 (Vol. XI, No.
283), p. 545 f.

(2) It was then that Sir William Willcocks designed the new
Hindiyah Barrage, which was completed in 1913. The Hindiyah
branch, to-day the main stream of the Euphrates, is the old
low-lying Pallacopas Canal, which branched westward above
Babylon and discharged its waters into the western marshes.
In antiquity the head of this branch had to be opened in
high floods and then closed again immediately after the
flood to keep the main stream full past Babylon, which
entailed the employment of an enormous number of men.
Alexander the Great's first work in Babylonia was cutting a
new head for the Pallacopas in solid ground, for hitherto it
had been in sandy soil; and it was while reclaiming the
marshes farther down-stream that he contracted the fever
that killed him.

From this brief sketch of progressive disaster during the later
historical period, the inevitable effect of neglected silt and flood, it
will be gathered that the two great rivers of Mesopotamia present a very
strong contrast to the Nile. For during the same period of misgovernment
and neglect in Egypt the Nile did not turn its valley and delta into
a desert. On the Tigris and Euphrates, during ages when the earliest
dwellers on their banks were struggling to make effective their first
efforts at control, the waters must often have regained the upper hand.
Under such conditions the story of a great flood in the past would not
be likely to die out in the future; the tradition would tend to gather
illustrative detail suggested by later experience. Our new text
reveals the Deluge tradition in Mesopotamia at an early stage of
its development, and incidentally shows us that there is no need to
postulate for its origin any convulsion of nature or even a series of
seismic shocks accompanied by cyclone in the Persian Gulf.

If this had been the only version of the story that had come down to us,
we should hardl